The Mind Hacking of Framing, but it gets more cursed

I think I must have had an article planned like this, like back in 2019-ish when I also wanted to write a lot of articles but wasn't as skilled. (In fact my writing style has also improved and changed a lot since I started the idea of making articles, which was like in March 2026, but this article was one of the earlier written ones )

Level 1

A classic example is World of Warcraft where in beta, players received 100% experience for the first few hours of play, which dropped to 50% as "fatigue" set in. Players felt punished for playing too long and viewed it as a "debuff". The designers doubled the required XP per level but changed the wording so players received a 200% "rested bonus" after being offline, which eventually "depleted" to a "normal" 100% rate.

The Spaghetti Monster added a "login box" every 24 hours, but it was buffed to be a random amount mostly between 30-90 minutes. This was framed as an act of generosity when what it does is make players addicted to watching artificial ingame numbers-go-up keep the game on all the time.

The 'Pity Timer' feature in many gacha games is nice mentally for the player to not feel like they're going on a huge losing streak, even though it is statistically rare.

In deckbuilders, especially with a looping deck (you reshuffle from your discard when you run out), a short deck is more consistent than a big one. That means card removal can be a good thing. In Slay the Spire, events often play with the 'flavor' of adding or removing a card - usually not acknowledging that removal is often good, and acting like adding is always good. This is part of the learning experience of the game in my opinion. I loved one moment in Slay the Spire 2, where a horrible card from the original game that had a theme of a "metamorphosis butterfly" with a 'powerful' (but expensive, inconsistent effect) was now an event card reward where it was presented as all-positive to let this butterfly in your deck, when gameplay wise it is really not.

In many roguelikes you gain 'unlocks' that expand the item pool for random drops, but if you think about it some of these unlocks may not be good or synergistic, and if you had the choice you would prefer not unlocking them.

In Minecraft competitive challenges (that are played in normal Survival), people rarely seem to want to die on purpose, if they lose a 1v1 it's framed as a defeat for them. This is odd because a death is really just a teleport with a full heal of your health hunger + 5 saturation bars.

In Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, despite it having one of the best premises for a game, ultimately ended up with an unoriginal story, where many roadblocks seem completely contrived and meaningless. This is odd in a way because in every game you do 'arbitrary' tasks, but identical roadblocks and moving can feel either contrived or engaging, depending on a change of narrative dressing.

Level 2

Casinos use the vibe of luxury to mask that statistically you are constantly losing money for being in one, and lotteries also count in a smaller way.

People can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on games with gambling systems, including physical card games and such. This is, in my opinion, a representation of horrible sense of value in life / not understanding the path to improving in real life, but the framing aspect is how those people probably wouldn't even enjoy the game if they just had a dev account with everything unlocked, where there's no external 'progression' there. This is true for the sense of 100%'ing a game and it feeling empty, a weird sense since even people who "100%"'d a game probably have not found all the glitches or interesting plot details or dev history.

███ █████ ██████ ████ ███████ ███ ████ ██ █████ ██ █████ ███ ████ ██ ███ ███ ███ ██████ ██ ████ ████ ████ ████ ██████ ██ ██ ███████ ███ ██████ ████████ ██ ████This is a high value piece of magic that I don't think I will be drawing attention to.

Level 3

"Who actually benefits more" from some business deal (since both are gaining something), is unclear in moments that can even let someone switch who should be handing over money / "buying/selling" it.

Hold on that sentence is probably poorly worded, here's an example:

Let's say a new merch luxury brand wants to collaborate with an influencer on some limited-edition item.

The brand's perspective: "We're giving exposure to our customer base, handling all manufacturing, shipping, financial risk, you should pay us a fee to launch your merch."

The influencer can say: "My audience trusts me, and by promoting your brand, I am also giving trust to you as a company, and you should pay me for marketing and licensing my likeness."

Both sides are gaining something but negotiations on who's getting the 'better deal' can be biased and reframed.

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On another note, I will go against what most people tend to say here and say that 'paid in exposure' is actually a legit thing. Influencers get paid for exposing their audience to certain products all the time, smaller content creator careers have been launched by bigger ones, people get prestige and status for working at a bigger known company.

Of course this is often cursed because, the main stereotype coming to mind with 'pay in exposure' is a small artist getting way less than expected and no real money for doing actual work for a big company, and makes it really, really obvious that 1) exposure is fickle and 2) frustration of a "rich get richer" effect if already-successful can get away with paying in 'exposure'.

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When your favorite indie music or game or friend becomes niche/hipster to sponsored/mainstream there really are different vibes and expectations, even if that person necessarily didn't ask for it.

Sometimes people treat someone poorly but then find out they're rich (in money or status) and suddenly two-face. Their previous irritating behaviors that were a sign of their poorness and low-statusness suddenly become ignorable meaningless silly things or even quirks to copy.

This is a really good quote from the inventor of Old Old Chess Battle Advanced (the Spaghetti Monster):

there's a few hidden things on steam where if you make your game gigantic and slow to patch then people notice their internet lagging and go check downloads and see your game and return to play it, but if you optimize down to having a 50mb game instead of 50gb they never notice it. There's another thing where people announcing their weekly server downtime over and over again gets promoted onto everyone's library page, but if your game has 99.999% uptime there is no reward and nobody notices that. There's another thing where if you squeeze money from people the average pay rate goes up which is a metric storefronts optimize for even if 99% of players hate it, but if you do the opposite you're punished and buried and nobody cares. The list goes on

Note that The Spaghetti Monster has also used dark patterns so people get addicted to opening lootboxes.

Level 4

The 'blue vs. red' button viral poll where if >50% press blue everyone lives, but if <50% press blue only the people who press red live, is a classic constantly reframeable problem. Blue button pressers framed as willingly walking into a crusher/woodchipper/suicide blender.

Inaction vs. action in general and what is 'moral' and what you should do.

OpenAI "reset weekly token quota every 1 million new users" feels like a con because it's like worse than a consistent 1 week reset, it disrupts people who scheduled based on weeks, if you have 20% tokens remaining and you suddenly get reset you are spending from "next week's" quota.

Sometimes 'updates' deprecate things you liked, mess with UI, even screw with something you relied on. It is very much not an update.

Level 5

Deceptive design, or "dark patterns", have long been used in marketing/UX design to manipulate users into making decisions that benefit the company rather than the user, obviously exploiting cognitive biases and psychological triggers to influence behavior. Subscription services that are a maze to unsubscribe from, 'free' things that require payment of a different thing, overfrequent limited time offers/discount, trick wording, etc.

In work, 'unlimited vacation' leading to ambiguity and no PTO (paid time off) days, "we're a family", free pizzas and arcade games in the office to distract you from direct money comparisons.

Negative association applying: gone wrong, this is basically applying conspiracy theory thinking in 'normal' contextsas opposed to normal thinking to real conspiracy contexts, which is also distinct. I've always been highly suspicious of people who can frame someone you've never met (or actions you haven't personally seen) as a bad person, very easy for this to be maliciously motivated. Someone trying to be equal and sincere in seeing people's viewpoints often gets an insulting label by more extreme members of a group, for being too easily stereotyped as the outgroup and opposite party. In storywriting you can see this as a way to misrepresent a character before you meet them, but also criticize their actions if they look a bit too close to the 'established taboo' at the time. This of course applies to real life as well. One piece of social dark matter is the retroactive un-taboo of AI projects like Neuro, Infinite Craft, previous procgen games that could be equivalently criticized to ways AI is criticizedas in the "why you would experience something no one created" meanwhile, procgen puzzle games and dictionary-searched puzzles, people have gold-completed entire level selects of 14MV by the way, and what people would feel about someone trying to make a new project very similar to it, vs. the retroactive taboo you can feel with a name like "Smart AI Games" (this is the name of the creators of Veggie Quest, a game I had a full series on my channel), or the retroactive taboo to TTS voices. This is of course the most effective example due to the broadness and technical specificity of the term that public discussion is not equipped to deal with, of course despite exposing the viciousness of many people with personal attacks, this is far from the worst type of heated topic.

I also feel from experience that "positively framed" stereotyping can be just as bad as negatively framed stereotyping, or worse. Now it's perfectly normal to have fun with others in your group in the sense that "we have a shared mindset and some things are unexpectedly correlated", but it makes me very uncomfortable when others go so far in that, that they seem to want to become a walking stereotype on purpose (and encourage others to). Because this excludes others who would otherwise be objectively part of the group but aren't as outgoing with it, or even disagree with the 'consensus' of what is best for the group. Especially when it becomes a 'positive' stereotype in a community that due to your identity you're supposed to also have the same political views of the group stereotype, it's not better if it's framed positively, it's just gatekeeping with a different coat of paint.

Smoking, besides decades of tobacco industry coverups of it being bad for you, was successfully marketed as female empowerment and rebellion. This kind of reframe is still so utterly messed up to me, we're still vulnerable to such tactics today. It's probably the biggest inversion of "good" ever that is possible to talk about at the moment, one of the worst possible ideas being presented in a glorified light, believed as consensus at the time and any evidence of the opposite was suppressed for decades.

The inverse is also true and is the chilling social dark matter. You wonder why you don't really see any sincere honest guides to life or reflections by people or, while you can see lots of "very bad" people online, the sense of "very good" is capped and you are in a haze of lack of trust. That sentiment is most reflected by the classic quote, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him" (-Cardinal Richelieu).

Takeaway

There was one point I felt framing could be used for good. The locked content nature of CCG's actually lets you see low-complexity stuff early in an organized way. In some games being a F2P can be a better experience than a paid player, although even though the fantasy is that you find a synergistic F2P build with your incredible intelligence, the devs don't want that and they prefer annoying bullet sponges or energy limits for not being an F2P.

Similarly 'gamification' is such a tacky word that makes it sound like you are adding EXP bars to math and calling it a day, yet there is a lot of good there: the sense of chapters, permanent progression, quests, that can turn an only-educational thing to one that is legitimately fun and well-thought-out (Ring Fit Adventure, Euclidea, etc.).

As I have seen more of this world though, the vast majority of framing is seemingly for manipulation and marketing. Creators of creative work probably have thought this at least once, that marketing is a painfully annoying thing to do, like you shouldn't need to advertise your quality if you have a high quality product, and out of a moral code decide not to. Discoverability algorithms and mentally absorbing the phrase 'word of mouth' like it's an abstract entity allow people to do this.

Marketers are not only selling you a product, but selling you a story. This is a game marketing lesson, many games don't have good trailers, screenshots, or hooks. There's things like highly valued forgers of fake Vermeer paintings that were appraised highly and then lost value afterwards.

PR and marketing is unfortunately a global lifeskill. If you don't do it you can also be oppositely framed or have credit taken from you. Unfortunately if you've ever suddenly been on the end of an accusation filled with lies and misrepresentations and manipulations, you start to realize that being more honest in your framing makes you vulnerable to disgusting things like that.